…well actually aluminium. I finally cut down an old ‘fm’ radio dipole to 2m and quietly ran yet another run of WF103 into the loft. So the Trio TR-9130 I got a few weeks ago finally has an aerial. SWR is not bad at 1.2 or so on the VNA. It’s mounted horizontally as I got the transceiver in the hope of one day finding some 2m SSB… well it’s been 3 hours, nothing yet! Impatient!
Anyway it worked fine for the local RSGB News this morning, and to hear someone asking if 145.5 was in use but with no callsign…
This also means I finally have a use for the KW520 SWR/power meter. However, it would not register any power on the 20W setting on the 140-525MHz range but did on the 1.8-200MHz range (both of course cover 2m). I took the lid off, discovered it would be rather difficult to get at the switches to check them so put it back together. Of course it now works fine. Perhaps the initial swearing at it actually worked.
The Trio causes some QRM on the speakers of one of our PCs – actually in the room below the dipole. But as I cured our mains-bourne QRM in general I feel I’m still winning.